#now pls embrace the spirit of Finwe and ship and let ship

[conundrumoftime]

My fellow Haladriels I do not know who has told you that according to The Lore elves can only love once, but a) this is not The Lore, and b) also in Tolkien 'The Lore' does not really work like that anyway.

In the words of Galadriel's grandfather Finwë:

It is unlawful to have two wives, but one may love two women, each differently, and without diminishing one love by another. Love of Indis did not drive out love of Míriel, so now pity for Míriel doth not lessen my heart's care for Indis.

What is rare is elf remarriage, and this is partly because of the absolute drama that Finwë's led to.

Also: the law on when remarriage is and isn't allowed is set down by the Valar in Valinor to the elves living there. What the elves living in Middle-earth made of this - if they even heard of it, and how would they? - is unrecorded. Many of us have written fanfic that plays around with a culture clash on this issue!

Also also: the Noldor do not always do what the Valar explicitly tell them to do Or Else, which is how come Galadriel and many of her extended family are back in Middle-earth anyway.

Also also also, and (for me!) most importantly: there is no The Lore anyway, in the sense that people citing it in that sense mean (i.e. a rulebook for this fictional universe setting out what is true and what isn't and how everything works). There is a massive collection of notes, thoughts, essays, letters, stories finished and unfinished and drastically revised, much of it contradicting other bits earlier or later, some of it managing to contradict itself.

Also also also also, much of what is there is in this posthumously published material is presented (explicitly or by implication) within a framing narrative of something reported by a fictional character - as indeed are LOTR and The Hobbit. For example, there's an essay on how elf marriage works as part of 'Laws and Customs among the Eldar' in the History of Middle-earth; it's very unclear whose perspective this is written from; it's associated with a narrator called 'Ælfwine', who in some versions of some Tolkien things is a human who wrote about what an elf called Pengolodh told him about the history of Arda. Also there are Vikings but they're not important.

None of this means 'The Lore' is not important - it's fascinating, I recommend it to everyone, there's some amazing stuff in there - but it's not 'important' in the sense of being like a list of what is and isn't True. It's important in the sense of being mythology, being a collection of texts we can write stories about and frown at and go "I feel like Melian is getting away with far too much nonsense here" about and occasionally send each other snippets of saying things like "fyi there's a version where Maedhros and Earendil and Elwing all end up in the flying ship together, thought you'd appreciate this one" and so on.